Sila's Fortune

by Fabrice Humbert

  ‘We’re back at the beginning, Lev. We’re Yeltsin’s team, we’ve got power now but just as we were in those early days, we’re confronted by the same alternatives: fight or die. These are interesting times, Lev. We’re coming to the end of the Yeltsin era. The man who made us is on his way out. He can’t hang on much longer. He hasn’t got the strength or the skills. The oligarchs are keeping him at arm’s length, but we need a new man. Russia has only got a couple of weeks, the crash is coming any day now.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive,’ said Litvinov. ‘The coffers are empty. The tax system is dead, there’s not a rouble coming in, it’s total collapse. The Russian state is bankrupt.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Like I said, a few weeks, a couple of months at most.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘First, try to save us, then restore order.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. Yeltsin is still acting on a whim: he’s just fired Chernomyrdin and the guy replacing him just isn’t up to it. Kiriyenko isn’t going to go far, we need someone else.’

  ‘But not someone too powerful, right?’ Lev said. ‘Someone strong enough to run the country and shrewd enough to maintain our beautiful triangle: an economic oligarchy indestructibly linked to the Kremlin and the central and regional administrations, in our best interests, obviously.’

  The head of the Brotherhood burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he said, ‘a magnificent triangle. But don’t forget us, the oligarchs need us. Without us, you become very vulnerable. Terribly human. The triangle becomes a square.’

  ‘Of course he’s right, Lev is always right,’ said Litvinov. ‘Everyone on Yeltsin’s council admired you. Such intelligence!’

  Lev knew that he was despised even for this. He waited for Litvinov to get to the point.

  ‘When the crash comes,’ Litvinov went on, ‘the rouble will plummet, banks will collapse. It’s going to be hard to shore up the triangle. What are our options? The IMF and restructuring.’

  Lev said nothing.

  ‘The IMF is a no-brainer. A bankrupt Russia is too much of a threat. They can’t let us go under and they know it. The whole bloc would collapse. In a couple of months, they’ll be pumping in billions, and I’m telling you, Liekom is well placed to make the most of it. Trust me, not everything will be going into Yeltsin’s pockets. I’ve already set out a couple of nets, we’ll make a healthy catch.’

  ‘What about the restructuring?’ asked Lev, his mouth a little dry.

  Litvinov hesitated. He too seemed a little nervous. He chose his words carefully.

  ‘Liekom needs ELK. And ELK needs Liekom.’

  There was silence. Of course. It had to be that. Why else organise this meeting?

  ‘ELK is not for sale.’

  ‘I’m sorry Lev, but you’re broke, you can’t afford to pay anyone.’

  ‘The banks are behind me.’

  Litvinov’s eyes froze. Lev understood: he was going to shut down the banks. The Seven controlled everything. If Litvinov made their minds up for them, Lev’s credit would be completely cut off.

  ‘We’ll make you a very generous offer. And obviously, you’ll stay on as the head of ELK. You’re the man for the job. You’ve got a first-rate company. But the financial crisis is too severe. We have to pool our resources. Several of the smaller oil companies need to merge, it’s inevitable. The future belongs to the multinationals. Divided, we’re weak. United, we’re invincible.’

  Lev knew this argument by heart, and the hackneyed sentence made him smile. That smile, a fleeting suggestion of a detachment he did not feel, surprised Litvinov.

  ‘We’ve been fighting a long time, my friend,’ Litvinov said, putting his hand on Lev’s arm. ‘Ten years. More than most men have to in ten lifetimes. Now it’s time to enjoy life. To spend time with our families. These are our most precious assets.’

  Litvinov clearly knew what had happened in his personal life. In fact, all of Moscow probably knew that Elena had left him. Yet Lev thought he sensed a surprising melancholy in Litvinov’s tone.

  ‘We have braved a difficult period in Russian history. And we have come through it with honour, defending freedom and free enterprise, just as we promised when we were Yeltsin’s team. I won’t mince words: I wanted power, I have power. And my interests merged neatly with those of the country. We built up vast companies, we are the face of modern capitalism. And we did it ourselves. Us, the oligarchs. Through our energy, our skill. But that era is coming to an end now, it’s time to retire. This is an opportunity for you, Lev! You’ll be richer than ever. Free to go on running your company or to go and soak up the sun in the most beautiful palaces in the world.’

  Lev knew what he was going to say. He had to say the words slowly, almost regretfully, because these words, which signalled his defeat, his reversal of fortune, were not his own. It was not he who was speaking but a peasant farmer bound to his land by all the ancestral power of ownership.

  ‘I want to be independent.’

  He had said it as he should have, in the silence of last words. Slowly, forcefully, as one might repeat the noble words of a great writer. Riabine had been a great writer. Riabine was the perfect writer of a Russian scene.

  Litvinov turned to the man leaning against the wall. The man remained impassive.

  ‘I was hoping for a different answer, Lev.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, my friend.’

  Lev had never referred to him like this.

  ‘What do you want to make you change your mind?’

  ‘Nothing. My mind is made up.’

  Litvinov turned again, shrugged helplessly, and again the man remained deadpan.

  Lev got to his feet. He looked at Lianov, who held his gaze. Litvinov also stood up.

  ‘Stay well, my friend. A terrible time lies ahead for us. I hope that we survive.’

  The warning was clear. Curiously, it was with a certain cordiality that they shook hands. They shared the times. The victories, the defeats, the shifting eras. It would all be different. The transition was coming to an end and from the ruins a new world would doubtless rise, one whose features were not yet defined.

  Lianov opened the door.

  Lev moved away down the corridor. Destruction carried on. Communism was dead. Transition was dead. The times ahead would know the brutality of power stripped of the tatters of democracy. The Brotherhood had asserted itself and it was Lianov now who ran Liekom. There could be no doubt. The former lords could begin to stray through the melancholy ruins of power. Power was passing to others, in the terrifying nakedness of violence.

  21

  Elegance is chilling. Elegance, culture and ease are chilling for those who do not possess them. Particularly so for a shy, narrow-shouldered quantitative analyst. It was not as bad as Samuel had warned. It was worse.

  The nightmare began with a Chelsea flat that was perfect, terrifyingly perfect. Why couldn’t it at least be a nouveau-riche apartment? Why, from the moment he walked in the door, this supposedly aristocratic English taste, the immaculate perfection of art and literature? Why did the library shelves have to soar all the way to the ceiling? Why did the paintings have to seem so brilliant, so quintessentially modern? Why did this woman have to be both a banker and a sophisticate, nourished by centuries of wealth and education?

  The nightmare was Zadie’s friends greeting him with a politeness so perfect, so chilling, with a hint of pensive aloofness corresponding exactly to the time they needed to weigh him up and, inevitably, find him wanting. They were beautiful, well dressed and doubtless devastatingly intelligent. Their accent was high-flown, so English that a student as poor with languages as Simon was inevitably ridiculous.

  The nightmare was also, was especially, the rapid-fire conversation, filled with rapid-fire allusions and in-jokes based on their long friendship, references that completely eluded him and denoted an intimacy from which
he felt excluded.

  Simon stood there, glass in hand, in the grip of his crippling shyness, quite simply crushed by this elegant gathering. How could he escape? How could he avoid these well-meaning glances, somewhat bemused by his utter silence. How could he get out of here?

  Perhaps he should have avoided knocking over the vase on the hall table as he arrived. It was an outdated movie gag. But then it was crystal clear that Simon was an outdated gag. A man pierced with the paralysing arrows of shyness is always an outdated gag. He feels so clumsy, so ugly.

  ‘Simon is our most brilliant quant,’ said Zadie, to help her guest out.

  ‘Bravo,’ a young man named Peter commented ironically.

  ‘It was completely by accident,’ muttered Simon.

  Everyone laughed. My God, this feeling of being ridiculous …

  ‘And I can recite Rimbaud,’ he added.

  His statement was so absurd that they took it for English humour. They laughed again.

  ‘What exactly is a brilliant quant?’ Peter asked him.

  ‘I have no idea. Zadie is brilliant, I solve equations.’

  ‘But solving equations is brilliant,’ interrupted a young woman, ‘at least I think so, I was never able to, even at school.’

  Simon turned to her gratefully. She was pale and had a long nose and light green eyes.

  ‘Really?’ said Simon, his tone too shrill and strange.

  He thought it incredible that someone would not be able to solve equations at school. It was a gesture of friendship.

  ‘Really,’ said the young woman.

  ‘Neither could I,’ a number of others said in concert.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ protested Peter, who was having fun. ‘What is a brilliant quant?’

  ‘A brilliant quant is an analyst whose equations make money for the bank,’ said Zadie simply.

  ‘In that case, a brilliant banker is a banker who makes money for the bank,’ said Peter.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Then let me rephrase the question. What are the qualities of a brilliant banker?’

  Zadie thought.

  ‘Greed?’

  Everyone turned. It was Simon who had spoken. His mouth was dry, he didn’t know how he could have made such an outrageous remark. Zadie looked at him, a twinkle in her eye.

  ‘Yes, greed. That’s the primary quality of a banker.’

  The young woman with the pale eyes smiled.

  ‘A taste for gambling?’ Simon ventured.

  ‘A taste for gambling. Taken to the extreme. The urge to take maximum risks.’

  ‘The ability to lie?’

  Zadie hesitated.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said at length. ‘Yes, it is sometimes necessary.’

  ‘Blindness?’

  Everyone stared at Simon in astonishment. But no one is more foolhardy than a shy person on a roll.

  ‘No. Little bankers blind themselves. People of no real worth. Blindness is the mark of a trader who’s on a losing streak. He buries his head in the sand. Keeps playing even when he’s losing, even when he’s losing the bank’s money.’

  ‘The headlong rush? said the woman with the green eyes, decidedly friendly.

  Zadie nodded.

  ‘It’s a feature of the system. It’s not about the bankers themselves. Credit, and hence the essence of our system, is inevitably threatened by the headlong rush since it’s based on futures. The future is our only maturity date. By definition, we’re constantly moving forward, and if things move faster we have to move faster. The financial world is a race circuit where the cars have no brakes. When things are going well, all the cars race round. If one of them has an accident … anything can happen.’

  Everyone fell silent. The young woman with green eyes glanced at Simon. Then suddenly, there was a thaw in the atmosphere. The narrow-shouldered quantitative analyst felt he had been adopted.

  A caterer had prepared a buffet. Simon was hungry. The young woman complimented him on his appetite. He asked her name. She was Jane Hilland.

  ‘My mother’s French,’ she explained.

  ‘And I suppose your father’s a British banker?’ joked Simon, referring to the Hilland Bank.

  ‘He is. I didn’t realise you knew him,’ said Jane with a big smile.

  The young woman was an art history professor at Cambridge. All this was overwhelming; clearly Simon’s first impression had been right: he should never have come.

  ‘What I love about Vermeer,’ he said suddenly, ‘is the silence that radiates from his paintings.’

  It was something he had read in a class many years ago. He still remembered it. Jane looked at him warily.

  ‘Yes … I’m sure,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all the more surprising given he was conceived during a thunderstorm.’

  There was a flicker of doubt in Jane’s eyes as though she suspected he was making fun of her. Simon panicked.

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ he said.

  ‘I have to confess, I don’t know one way or the other,’ said Jane magnanimously, ‘I don’t think so, but never mind …’

  ‘I love art.’

  ‘And Rimbaud, don’t forget Rimbaud!’ Jane reminded him, smiling.

  In two minutes flat Simon had managed to blow any impression of intelligence out of the water. But though he did not realise it, his innocence was more touching than the cleverest speeches. Jane liked unusual people. In Simon she had found a perfect specimen.

  She asked about his parents. He told her they were dead. His face tensed at the word. Again she found him touching.

  ‘You enjoy working in banking?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. It makes me feel like I’m a gangster. I used to be a maths geek, now I’m a gangster in a foreign city.’

  ‘A gangster?’

  ‘Just an expression. A tough guy.’

  Jane thought of her father. No – this was not how she had ever pictured a banker.

  Simon, who still had a glimmer of common sense, started laughing.

  ‘I’m joking. Let’s just say I find the image makeover interesting.’

  This spark of lucidity in an otherwise absurd conversation had the benefit of stopping Jane on the fatal path towards maternal feeling.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to leave. I’ve got somewhere I have to be. But I’d like to see you again, you are a remarkable person.’

  Simon shuddered.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘A remarkable person,’ he thought to himself. ‘Remarkable is very positive. A lot better than banal for example.’

  That evening, he ate a lot, drank a lot, talked a lot, more often than not coming out with gibberish so off the point that he kept everyone in stitches. Without realising, he was the clown prince of the evening and everyone complimented Zadie on finding a Frenchman with such a deadpan sense of humour. Blessed are the simple-minded.

  When he got home, Matt was waiting for him.

  ‘So, did you fuck her?’

  At this late hour, the question was exhausting. Simon answered that he had met a wonderful woman who taught art history. His friend stared at him with the barely disguised scorn he reserved for matters of women, as though he alone was capable of making a judgement in this domain.

  ‘Art history, eh?’

  ‘Yes. She seems very clever,’ added Simon though he had no idea.

  ‘Good-looking?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘So, you mean she’s ugly?’

  Matt sighed. Then he stretched and yawned, clearly bored. Simon felt humiliated. He had managed to charm and now he was being denied his victory. Now his conquest was ugly when actually she had been wonderful, so icy at first and then so warm.

  ‘You going to bang her?’

  This was how Matt always talked. Always in the crudest terms. Naive though he was, Simon sensed a maliciousness in Matt, a desire to put him down though he could not understand why.

  ‘I’d happily see her again.’
r />   Matt nodded disdainfully.

  ‘So how was the party?’

  Simon gave a detailed account of his every gesture, his every fear, his encounter with Jane, his conversations.

  ‘You really said that a good banker was a greedy, blind liar?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you crazy? You’ve worked your last day at Kelmann.’

  Simon felt his heart hammer. Unfortunately his best, his only friend had a knack for coming out with a cruel truth, a bitter prophecy.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Matt sniggered and explained why what he had said went against the fundamental rule of business, which was hypocrisy. The cake must be all gold and diamonds, even if it was nothing more than a thin film concealing all the treachery in the world. Words must cloak things with a dazzling layer designed to reflect the majesty of desires, otherwise, if the truth was told, it would all explode. Developing his argument, in one of the lyrical flights he so favoured, especially late at night, he went on to state that in fact the rule applied to the whole of society, which lived on myths and put all its hopes in ideological constructs, pure egalitarian populist images, feeding the social Moloch with necessary illusions.

  Simon only vaguely listened.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘It’s possible. But not only was Zadie not angry, she’s asked me to join her team. She’s been appointed head of derivatives and I’m going with her.’

  Matt’s smile froze into a rictus.

  22

  The fire bellowed in the night like some great monster. Flames climbed the rigs, licking at the oil rising from the bowels of the earth with the speed of a conflagration. The fire was sticky, liquid, heavy and devastating, cloaking everything in sweltering suffocation. Dark clouds of gas rose into the heavens, drawing the fire upwards where it spread across the blazing sky. The initial explosion had sent up an incandescent geyser in front of the security guards and then the barrels began to explode, belching torrents of flame. The ground, the air were thick with this blistering blindness and everyone had dashed from the surrounding sheds and fled.

  Lev was called and he came by helicopter to survey the disaster.

  Stock still, he uttered not a word. The high explosives needed to snuff the wellhead were on their way; meanwhile the bulldozers, black ants in the flickering flames, were digging trenches to check the progress of the fire.